


hours they seemed like days

by PositivelyVexed



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, M/M, Mike-Centric, Minor Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Minor Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Minor Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:00:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22422982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: Mike tends to live in the past. Even after defeating IT, he keeps replaying history. Replaying, and replaying.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 41
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2019





	hours they seemed like days

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darlingargents](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/gifts).



The night before he left town, Mike went into the woods around Derry and collected the root one last time.

He found the plant clustered under the fronds of a common fern, huddled in the shadows they seemed to prefer. The older Shokopiwah woman who'd told him about the root had cautioned him that they liked to hide. She had lifted up the leaves and shown him the strange flowers that grew like wrinkled faces, shriveled and tiny. “A hundred miles in any direction and you won't find these anywhere. And who knows. Maybe that's for the best.”

Her name had been Jessica. When Mike had told her that his mother's name had been Jessica, she'd patted his hand. "Strange thing. I had a son named Mike." He didn't dare chase after all the loss wrapped up in that _had_ , didn't feel he'd earned that kind of intimacy with a woman he'd only been peppering with questions about local history less than a week. His eyes had just dropped to the ground shyly.

Mike hadn't asked what she meant about it maybe being for the best that the root grew no further. He was used to the one blessing associated with Derry things being that they didn't extend far beyond Derry. He'd taken the root in their smokehouse. Packed the root into a pipe, and felt the present day melt away with each puff, feeling the ancient past emerge from the shadows of the walls, wondering if this was what he'd missed out on by not doing anything harder than pot in college, knew instinctively, in some animal part of the human brain that's older than the rest that this was nothing like ordinary hallucinogenics. He was being shown something real and terrible. The vision of the arrival of _IT_ on Earth. A window into the past, covered with a pane of glass. He'd felt as if he could have reached out and touched it, and only the knowledge that he couldn't kept him from curling up and dying of sheer terror, that day in the Shokopiwah smokehouse.

* * *

Move on, Bill said over the phone. He had a standing invitation in LA any time he wanted it, Bill told him gently. Chicago too, Ben and Bev had reminded him. Even Richie had told him to drop by his place in Hollywood.

And he intended to do all of that. 

He was finally ready to leave town, he told himself. Except he was always going to have his roots in Derry. He smiled to himself, sadly, as he walked across the forest. Richie would have booed him off the stage for that one. He knelt down, found what he was looking for, under a half-dead fern plant beneath a tree. He brushed the fronds aside gently and saw what he was looking for. Delicate flowers above ground, delicate as lacework, with roots that were equally spidery below, but vast. The roots system, so long and deep for such a delicate plant, was what struck him. How extensive it was, tangled and spreading. It took hard work and gentle hands from both of them to unearth it intact, and it needed to be intact, she'd warned him.

"It's soaked up a lot of this land," she'd said softly. "The good and the evil. The power."

He'd turned the root over it over his hands, branching like extensive capillaries underground.

"Is it...does it belong to _IT_?"

"It's its own thing. It's been shaped by this land. The years here, in proximity to all this," she waved her hand around vaguely, then conceded, "To _IT_. Just like us."

That hadn't comforted him one bit, and she'd seen it on his face as he had turned away.

On his last night in Derry, he made himself more of the root tincture. Harder than usual to find. A small amount, dissolved in water, impossible to taste, but potent enough to see visions, as Bill had learned once. He'd heard from Jessica too, a few hours ago. She'd told him he'd been lucky to find any healthy root at all. Over the last couple weeks, most of the plants had been afflicted with rot. _Two weeks ago they'd killed IT._ Who knew if they'd bounce back next season, she continued, but she had her doubts. Mike had his, too.

* * *

So he gathered the root. Cooked it over the little stove top in the ramshackle little kitchenette that had been up here in the library, built, as far as anyone could tell, for the night watchman back when Derry Public Library was still the town's functioning clock tower and bell tower as well. Those days were long over by the time Mike had arrived. The little quarters dusty and abandoned, until he had needed a new place to live

He boiled the root at a low simmer, careful not to breath the steam in.

 _IT_ was gone. They had killed it, Mike had felt its quivering heart crumble into dust beneath his fingers. 

_IT had died the same moment Eddie had_ , a gruesome thought that he'd had with bizarre certainty since he'd watched Richie kneeling over him, and came to him again now. Like _IT_ had ensured that if it couldn't survive that it would at least take one last victim, like it still mattered that Eddie never got to draw his final breath in a world without _IT_.

Mike lifted the lid on the pot to stir the root, holding his breath as he did so. Even the root steam just getting into his eyes for a few moments was affecting him, making the edges of his vision woozy. Or maybe that was just good old Derry memory lane, sensing Mike was about to turn his shoes down other paths for once in his miserable life. And putting up a fight about it. 

He decided right then and there that when he was done making this tincture he was going to turn his attention to normal moving things, which he hoped meant opening up a forty of good malt liquor and finishing packing up the rest of his belongings. He was ready to be done with Derry. Ready to put all of this behind him.

Except that was a blatant lie, he thought, leaning over the stove.

As obvious and pathetic in its own way as an alcoholic telling himself he was quitting, right as he walked into the bar for one last drink.

 _But this was different_ , he protested. He’d be more than a hundred miles away by morning. These roots didn’t pop up like liquor stores across America.

* * *

It would be wrong to say he'd come to like taking the drug. Mike didn't have a lot of experience with other drugs to compare it too, but he suspected that the phrase "bad trip" was an understatement. Nonetheless, he'd gotten accustomed to it. Not the experience, but the lifeline to the past. A window, impossible to open but always just translucent enough to see through, although it wasn’t always clear what you were seeing, and he could heave himself up onto the sill whenever he needed to peer out into the rotten layers of history encrusting Derry. He’d done it greedily, hungrily, pouncing on every clue the visions gave.

He had a life, he had a future. He could have been free, but he didn't let himself get free. He couldn’t say why it felt essential to bring it with him.

He had only really learned to use the root tincture at thirty-five, which was probably a good thing. If he had spent longer with it, there was every chance a man like Mike, a historian, an investigator, prone to digging and loneliness and obsessiveness would have fallen prey to the particular kind of addiction to the root that Jessica had warned him about, even though he worked hard not to. At first, it had just been about going back to the beginning. To how _IT_ had arrived. 

He’d watched that comet arc across the sky again and again, feeling tears hot against his face, wondering if _IT_ had intended to come here, or if it had just been blind, terrible luck that had guided it through the cosmos to earth. And then it would be just a matter of cruel, inexorable time that would bring _IT_ across the paths of seven little children who would escape once, against all odds,only to be summoned back for round two by the one who never left; Executioner Mikey finally drops the blade with the pull of a lever, or rather, the touch of a glowing green button. The rational man who had weighed it all up in his head, who knew the six calls must be made and the little white lie had to be told.

Mike, the rational man, the responsible man, the compassionate man, not the madman who lived illegally in a library attic, pacing the floorboards at all hours and trying to convince himself that he hadn’t imagined all this, that this all made sense, he had the documentation, he had the ritual, he had the _roots._

He was losing track of his thoughts.

* * *

Building up some resistance to the root took some time at first, getting to the point where he wasn’t vomiting every time he let him himself linger in the vision world longer than two minutes. Once he could handle longer than that, he set his sights on learning why the first Ritual of Chüd had failed. 

All the Shokopiwah elders he’d spoken to on the matter agreed: the Ritual had been a brave effort, a mustering of the best knowledge their people had at the time, but they could not know the true nature of the evil they were dealing with. That such a ritual could never have worked against something like _IT_.

Mike had begun to suspect otherwise. 

* * *

Watching and re-watching the ritual, each time his vision getting clearer, the figures getting more lifelike, had revealed glimpses that seemed to Mike to tell him everything. The faltering chants of an old woman in the circle, moments before she was torn apart. The broken line of eye contact between two before they too were devoured. He was drawn to one above all else. How they’d faltered. He was also startled by how badly he wanted to reach in and give the man some comfort, some encouragement to believe that he could do it.

Mike tried to shout, _Just believe!_ at them. That was the key. But of course, it made no difference if it was. They were frozen like marionettes on their tracks.

Instinct had made him reach out towards them, and though he couldn’t help them, the root did seem to retain some small drop of poison from the past, enough to hurt, because when he reached out his hand to help the man, he got too close to the man’s skin, burning up now like crepe paper. It made him recoil. The pads of Mike's fingers throbbed as he cradled them to his chest like he’d just touched a hot stove. He lifted his hands half-expecting to see his prints burned away, but of course, the roots couldn’t do that. When his vision returned, he came to understand that he was lying on the floor. He put his good hand down on a pile of photographs and tried to lever himself up. His head lolled down for a moment, the movement making him dizzy, and he waited for the nausea to pass, breathing deeply and trying to steady himself by looking down at the photograph. 

The picture was one he'd taken with the polaroid camera his grandma had finally bought him for Christmas at the second-hand store when he was fifteen. 

Sunlight, falling in beams through the holes in the ground that made up the roof of the little dugout. Nothing to write home about, unless you knew it had been the secret construction project of one architecturally gifted eleven-year-old. 

Between a couple of surprisingly sturdy beams, a hammock was slung. Three boys sitting side-by-side in the slumping middle. Bill, Stan and Richie, shoved close and jostling for space, Eddie looking like he'd just thrown himself across their laps and was trying to balance there, the only one of them grinning brightly at the camera, all of them on the verge of tipping out.

Mike looked at the smiles frozen in time, a slight blur in the picture that Mike remembered came from giggling himself as he'd snapped the picture, then the blur seemed to deepen in his sight, the giggling in the boys' faces had gotten more raucous, the balancing act on the hammock more precarious.

And then they spilled out across the floor, the giggles dissolving into gales of laughter and swearing, and Mike _heard_ it. Felt it. Not like a memory playing out in his mind's eye. Like the weight of that clunky camera was in his hands, his own body--suddenly fifteen and acutely not under his own power, not _this_ Mike’s power--shaking with repressed laughter as he took in the sight of Eddie yelling at all of them that they were supposed to catch him. 

"Good job, asshole!" Richie was snapping right back. "You kneed me in the groin falling out of that thing. You could have just said something if you have a problem with me and your mom being together." 

“Ha ha, that’s so original, you should do your own stand up. Richie Tozier’s One Joke Tour.”

Stan was standing up and wiping dirt off his clothes as best as he could. Mike stared from one to the other, faces he hadn’t seen in so long, a lump in his throat. "Guys? Can you hear me?" he tried to say, but his mouth wouldn't form the words. They didn't seem to notice anything wrong at all, not even when Bill lifted his eyes to flash Mike a shy smile, brushing a cobweb out of his hair.

"Bill?" he tried to say. He felt certain in that moment that if anyone heard him, could make sense of what he was going through, it would be Bill. He remembered the jolt of excitement that had gone through him when he’d been here the first. The real time.

But he didn’t speak, and Bill didn’t hear him--the man. He just flashed another, wider smile at Mike, the boy. It was just a vision, was all. Like all the visions, you could hear, you could feel, but you couldn’t change anything.

He hadn’t know until this exact moment that he could travel to his own past, and it filled him with a giddy kind of terror to know it.

He pulled his head back, out of the picture, and it was just a picture again. He shook his head, the effects of the drugs making him woozy. It was the first time he realized that the roots went to every level of Derry, the young layers near the surface and the ancient ones far below. 

* * *

Mike usually used the root tincture for research, to figure out how to fight _IT_. 

He couldn't resist using it for the other thing from time to time, though. Seeing his friends again. As he had known them, not as they were out there in the real world now. Seeing them, and being seen by them, their smiles breaking out across their faces as they met his eyes, letting him imagine that that’s what they’d do if they saw him again now, instead of sliding across his face like they'd just seen a stranger.

* * *

Mike shed all those old newspaper clippings and rotting correspondence like an animal shedding its carapace. He stepped back and looked around the empty attic like a man beholding his future. But Mike had never really contemplated his future, at least not this part of it.

Clearing out the attic was surprisingly easy, because he was working under a simple precept: all that you can’t take in your car, or give to an interested party--library or historical society or museum or eccentric collector--must go in the trash. Holding himself strictly to that rule ensured that the vast majority of everything he’d acquired over his lifetime had gone straight in the trash.

And looking at it in these strict utilitarian terms held the guilt at bay. The heavy knowledge that he was disposing of the last shreds of the lives of so many victims, when he’d been the sole lantern-bearer of their memory for so long. 

The temptation to keep doing it was strong. Write a book. Train an apprentice to take over. But he’d known for a long time that there’d be no one after him in this lonely role. No one in Derry wanted to know. And maybe there was no way to make people see. He’d already sacrificed most of his life to trying to make people see. He’d nearly died destroying _IT_. He thought that was paying homage enough to the memories of the dead he’d studied all these years. The newspaper clippings would come down. The records would still be here and online for anyone who care to do the digging for themselves. But Mike was letting go. He’d given enough of himself to Derry.

_Yourself_

**_Yourself_ **

**_Yourself_ **

_Hey Mikey, remember when you gave all of Eddie to Derry? Buried him a hundred feet deep, at least_. He clutched his hands to his ears, like the voice was an audible sound he could block out. But that brain, that always was so good at ruthlessly following a line of thought wherever it led, no matter how unpleasant it was, if he felt it must be done, was rolling along. 

_And hey, Stan might not have died in Derry, but don’t all drains connect eventually? IT knew before any of you did, after all._

The trouble with having defeated IT, Mike decided, was that you couldn’t stay wrapped up in survival mode. Couldn’t keep deferring to that drill sergeant voice that sounded somewhat like his grandpa that said tough decisions had to be made, that if he stood still, dithering and refusing to make a plan, he was as good as offering his neck up for slaughter.

You had to live with the choices you had made, and all the hindsight in the world, and the knowledge of two men who had been there once, solid beside him, and two boys he had barely known that summer except they had helped him, and whose backs he wanted pressed against his when they in the dark, surrounded by nightmares on all sides.

He still heard his grandfather’s voice plenty, these days, too deeply engrained in his psyche to ever lose it, but he heard his own more and more with each passing day. The young, lost voice that whispered that _he was sorry, he hadn’t known_. That he had thought if anyone was going to die killing _IT_ , it would have been him. He’d been preparing for it, one way or another, his whole life.

* * *

He finished the tincture. It didn’t produce much. The spidery roots never did. That’s okay. He didn’t need much. Just enough to wean himself off.

Over the past few weeks, he’d watched the others move on. Ben and Bev had their life together. Bill returned to his life in Hollywood. He talked on the phone with Bill some days. Bill was always the easiest of them to talk to. Mike had always assumed that was because he was the leader. He kind of figured he was the nicest and the easiest to talk to for all of the other Losers and always had been. But he’d come to suspect, since their reunion, that things had shifted between them. That what really existed between them now was a peculiar kind of understanding that came from being the one who’d led friends into battle.

The difference was, when Bill had led them all in, he’d gotten them all out, too. That’s what made Bill a true leader.

He’d started crying on video chat while trying to explain something like that to Bill. Bill looked taken aback.

“You did all the real work. You were the one here alone while the rest of us left and forgot.”

And then there was Richie.

Richie...

Mike followed them all closely in the news, but Richie was probably the one in the public eye the most, at least since his public breakdown onstage had given his critics plenty of ammunition to go after him, to declare Richie a hack who was dead in the water. As if Richie hadn't been brought low enough already.

Mike had gotten in the habit of following his friends' careers years ago. The internet had just been getting started when he’d first tried looking up his friends. It had been hard finding them once, but not now. He kept in touch, called them. Richie knew when to be out to avoid having to talk to him, and according to the others, he did the same to them. The tighter he tried to knit them together, the more the missing threads seemed to stand out. The sadness in Richie’s eyes was unbearable when they finally did talk over conference call, but he seemed to throw himself into work. Writing his own material. Coming out. Not baring too much of himself, despite that. Mostly making fun of his old persona. All the sex he used to pretend to have when he’d never liked women at all. He was, despite all the critics and Twitter users who'd had their knives out for him, and some who were still eagerly carving, garnered good early notices.

It was palpable to all of them, who was missing, but they’d never had Stan and Eddie in their adult lives.

Mike had, in a way. He wished he could have given that to Richie. Wondered if it would have been some kind of comfort to him.

* * *

Sometimes he dreamed he held a quivering heart in his hand that was nothing like ITs. This was frighteningly human, still warm, raw and bleeding. It could have been the heart of a friend or a lover.

* * *

  
  


The night before he left Derry for good, he took the tincture one last time. He'd long since stopped needing photos to travel back to see his friends. His grandpa. His parents. He just collapsed into the overstuffed chair he pulled into the center of the attic, looking up into the hollow shell of the tower, and let the dizziness pass over him. His head fell back. He wanted to see one last vision before moving on. And then he'd move on for good. He didn't quite know where he'd land, and he didn't much care.

* * *

He stoppered the bottle with the final few drops of the root extract. Enough for a few more visions, at least. It would be enough to taper himself off after he left Derry. And when he was out, he wouldn’t go back for more even if he was tempted. He’d be nowhere near Derry.

Mike drove as far as Burlington, Vermont that night. He’d booked a room in a cozy little picturesque bed and breakfast just outside of town, made small talk with the owners when he got in late. The couple seemed fascinated to learn that he considered himself an amateur historian and grilled him on his knowledge of local Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. When he had to plead a lack of any special knowledge or interest in Revolutionary War heroes, they looked at him suspiciously, like he’d just come out and admitted his interest in history was really a sham, so he smiled politely and excused himself to bed. After he settled in his room, he sat on the bed.

He struggled with himself for perhaps a minute.

He generally preferred to smoke the root, the same way the Shokipawah consumed it traditionally, but he felt like the polite thing to do would be to not get smoke in the Ethan Allen suite and its pretty pillows.

All he needed was a small, heavily diluted drop of the stuff in a glass of water. He took two sips before laying back on the bed to wait.

* * *

“I can’t go into that house, Mike.” He felt Stan’s shoulder under his hand, patting him reassuringly. “I can’t.”

He was so reassuring with Stan, he thought hollowly, and didn’t know what to make of it. It was always a crapshoot what he would get, with the vision. Sometimes, the basket, or the polaroid picture, he could conjure up a vision of the past with an emblem. But he’d long since lost interest in that when he was just going on a journey for its own sake. He wanted to see the moments from the past he didn’t have tokens of.

This was strange, and he didn’t know what had brought it on, but, well, he had been thinking of Stan last night, hadn’t he? Had he summoned this moment just so he could hug him again? And, he realized, if this vision lasted long enough, he could hold Eddie again too as he lifted him into someone’s bike basket ( _just don’t focus too much on the part where you’re all menaced by the monster who will eventually kill him, Mikey_ ).

“Mike? You alright?” Stan kept a hold of him but leveled a gaze at him with evident concern.

He blinked, realized there were the alarming beginnings of hot wet tears in his eyes. “Hm?”

“You’re crying.”

A shudder run down his spine that had nothing to do with standing outside of Neibolt. Mike had no memory of crying when he had hugged Stan outside Neibolt house just before Pennywise had broken Eddie’s arm. In fact, he was sure he hadn't. He would have remembered someone comforting him if he cried. It wasn’t a common thing at that point in his life, and he would have been touched if Stan had.

He was still puzzling over this when he saw the murky edges of the vision deepen into his sightline until everything--Stan, Bev and Ben, and, towering over all of them like a gallows, Neibolt House--blurred into one shadow.

* * *

He came back to himself on his flower print bedspread, heart racing, trying to figure out why he felt so unsettled. 

He rolled over and tried to go to sleep. An hour later, still a long way from sleep, he grabbed his phone off the stand and messaged Ben and Bev in a group text. A short, simple text that he hoped wouldn’t make them think he was going crazy.

_Strange question, I know, but when I was hugging Stan outside the Neibolt house that time Eddie broke his arm, did I start crying?_

No sense in trying to explain. He just hoped they wouldn't think he was cracking up. He just hoped they weren't right if they did.

He was pulling down the driveway if the very willing bed and breakfast when his phone vibrated. A message from Bev.

Straight and to the point:

_I think you were_

_I remember looking back at you two and wanting to cry myself_

_Everything all right Mike?_

He didn't know how to respond.

When he was pulling in to fill up the gas tank several hours later, he saw a new message from Ben.

_That's what I remember too_

_Thinking about Stan?_

A pause.

_Are you still planning to come see us next week?_

He thought about his answer for several hours of driving, and eventually just typed out,

_Thanks, guys. Yeah, just thinking about Stan I guess.  
_

_And my memory’s just not what it once was._

_We're still on for Monday._

* * *

What was more likely? That he forgot a detail from a stressful moment in his childhood? Or that he had somehow managed to go back in time in his vision quest and really changed his own past? He knew how the rules of the physical world worked. Thought he knew how they broke, under Pennywise, too. This wasn't anything like that.

He ended up somewhere around Ithaca, at one of the Finger Lakes, he wasn’t precisely sure which one when he decided to get a room for the night. Learned the next morning after a continental breakfast of suspiciously crunchy-around-the-edges pancakes and eggs which lake he was at and made a note to remember it. 

He decided he was too stiff and tired to drive today, so instead, he took the nature trail to a waterfall. Hiked up to the top of the waterfall and took out one of the last packets of pipeweed prepared. Sat back against the tree and looked out across the breathtaking lake. Realized he couldn’t remember the lake’s name. Maybe he really was losing his mind. Decided he was just getting old.

* * *

He let himself get pulled under the waves, and when he emerged, he was in a convertible, fresh air blowing in his face, night summer wind blowing up his sleeves. One of those white t-shirts he had so favored in his youth.

“Y-y-you th-th-think you’ll g-g-g-go to college?”

Knew before he turned that he’d see Bill, of course, looking strangely dignified in crimson red graduation robes, mortarboard pressed tight between his knees to keep it from flying out of the convertible, shins bare because they’d all been wearing shorts packed into that stuffy gymnasium, his fine hair tossed in the air. Up front, Richie and Stan, also in graduation robes, were bickering amiably, their voices barely audible over the wind and the radio. Eddie…Right. Eddie was already gone by this point. Sonia determined to move him somewhere safer.

Bill looked at him, jaw wobbling. “Y-y-y-you‘re s-s-s-s-s-so,” Even as he struggled to get the words out, he met Mike’s eyes evenly. “S-s-s-smart. You sh-sh-sh-should r-r-r-really think about it. I mean, if you want to.” He only dropped his eyes then, when his words slipped out cleanly.

Mike felt his cheek heat, remembering how flustered he had been that day. How much it had meant, when Bill told him that, the pleased tingle spreading in his belly for a moment. How little difference it had made to Mike’s horizons, with the farm and his grandpa, getting weaker by the day. Even then, some voice of duty, whispering, _if you don’t stay, who will remember it?_

“Maybe I’ll get around to it in another nine years,” he said flippantly, wanting more than anything to get out of the conversation, to get Bill’s dumb, hopeful eyes off of him. It had taken him nine years to go to college. Not till he’d planned his grandpa’s funeral alone and sold the farm at a loss.

Bill stared at him, that vaguely hurt look when he could tell he was being teased but there didn’t seem to be any reason for it.

This, he was very certain, was not how it had gone.

His first thought was to stay silent. To not change anything. That he had not come here intending to change anything. That there had never been anything about this particular moment that he had wanted to change, unless it was to beg his friends not to leave him. To not walk away and forget what had happened like Bev and Ben and Eddie already had. He had known even then that that was not a reasonable thing to ask of them.

“Y-you all right?” Bill asked, voice soft. Concerned.

He was weary of his friends asking him that. He was not all right. Not then, not now. _You’re all about to leave me._

“I’m just gonna miss you guys, is all,” he said forcing a smile. Had he said anything like that before? Maybe. But he was quite sure that this was all him, the grown Mike, the man from the future, the man who was only supposed to be peaking through a sealed window--who was it now. And they were hearing it. Bill’s mouth opening slightly, Stan half-turning in front of him.

“We’ll write,” Richie prompted up from the front seat. He couldn’t believe Richie had even overheard him. “You can live the whole campus lifestyle through me. I’ll send you a postcard the first time I do a keg stand, the first time I teach two sorority sisters to l _o_ o _o_ ve...”

“So you’re not going to hear from Richie,” Stan said.

“Well _you_ just got off my mailing list. The point is, we’re all going do better than that traitor, Eddie,” Richie said, a note of genuine bitterness on his voice that he seemed to be trying hard to hide. “Can’t believe a guy would just skip town and forget his friends two weeks later.”

For a moment, silence fell over the car.

“It’s okay,” Mike said weakly. “People get busy. Just try to stay in touch, guys.” What else could he say?

Stan put his elbows on the back of his seat and turned all the way around to face Mike for a second. “I know you don’t believe we’ll stay in touch. But I really like writing letters. I’ve been writing a letter a month to my Grandma in New York since I was nine. I’ll keep up writing to you, Mike. That’s a promise.”

He leaned towards Stan, and whispered, too low for Bill too hear, though he couldn’t quite position his head so he could block out the sight of Bill’s surprised face in the twilight, trying not to look like he cared one way or another that Mike was cutting him out of the conversation, “Did I cry? Back outside Neibolt house? That day? Right before Eddie’s broken arm?”

Stan started to pull away, his lips parting in a kind of puzzled offense, like Mike had asked him a trick question. “Did I say something wrong?”

“I’m serious. Can you tell me?”

Stan was staring at him, his dark eyes, deep and always a bit like a prey animal, skittish and wary, were searching his. “Yeah, you did. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t go in there. I didn’t mean to make you--”

“You didn’t--” he started to say, then stopped. There was no way to say the truth, which was that Stan had made him cry, but not the boy on Neibolt Street. The boy in front of him had done nothing wrong. “It’s not your fault. I want you to go out there and have a good life.”

Stan smiled at him, but it was a sad kind of smile, an ironic smile that said he smelled bullshit. But what could he do? Tell Stan where his story ended? Hell, maybe he should. Mike always had hated the characters who knew what was going on in stories, who alone held the key to changing some terrible outcome, but never told anyone out of fear. Mike had dedicated his whole life to never being that guy.

But the Ritual of Chud had reminded him that not everything that looked like a key was a key, and he wasn’t as good at telling the difference as he thought he was.

He didn’t say more, and Stan didn’t press him for more. The world started to dissolved around him, and he let it, only fought it a little as Stan turned back to Richie and his voice turned back to laughter, and he felt, with a shock of genuine surprise, Bill’s hand creep across the seat towards his, wrapped a square hand over his comfortingly.

* * *

It took him a long time to come back to himself in the present, to the point that when he hauled himself to his feet, it was already twilight, and he hiked back the trail in ever-increasing fear of twisting his ankle in the dark, or of running into a bear or mountain lion or armed rednecks or whatever else came out in these woods at night. When had he gotten so reckless, anyway? Forty seemed late to be picking up a dangerous drug habit. But this was a pretty remarkable drug habit, given the circumstances. His heart was pounding as he walked back to the hotel, and not just from exertion. He was thinking of the sheer power that had apparently been dropped in his hands, unasked for, and what it meant. What should be done with it?

By the time he'd got back to his room he'd vowed that whatever else, he would lay off the root for a couple of of days.

In the end, he held off for four days, including three of the days he stayed with Ben and Bev. They were kind to him and generous, and seemed to fit together with a kind of conscious wonder, like they were still unused to each other’s presence and were still getting used to every touch, but were grateful for it.

He was a little worried, at first, that they were going to treat him with kid-gloves, the in-patient third wheel they were tending to when they’d rather be sailing on a boat or rolling around in bed.

 _What if I told you I think I’m traveling back in time and changing the past with our friend group?_ he almost asked one night when they were sprawled across Ben’s geometrically pleasing modern sofas, a shot glass in each of their hands. _I don’t do anything useful with it like save a kid from Pennywise or save my parents or figure out if JFK was an inside job. I just seem to cry a lot and make my friends uncomfortable._ He tried it out in his head and felt a sudden surge of guilt and dread. Guilt at using it at all. Guilt at not turning it over at once to his friends, to let Bev stop her mom from taking the pills, let Ben stop his dad from getting on the plane. And yet the thought of doing those things, of ensuring Ben never came to Derry, of maybe maybe making sure they never met Bev, never fought Pennywise that summer, seemed equally monstrous. Weren’t there a million sci-fi books and several successful movie franchises about this dilemma?

The problem with telling them wasn't really that he didn’t think they’d believe him, but that he didn’t yet know what he was trying to convince them of. The enormity of its implications were so huge that they spun his mind around trying to think of them. 

Instead, he just started speaking, thinking out loud. 

Ben had just stopped giggling at something Bev had said. If a puppy could get drunk on both alcohol and love, the expression on its face would look a little like the one Ben was shooting Beverly at this exact moment.

They all fell into a fond silence.

Mike spoke up.

“I’m beginning to think that Pennywise’s death has changed the rules about some things in Derry.”

“Hm?” Bev said sleepily. "What things?"

“You know that uh, root I gave Bill?”

Bev pushed herself up on an elbow, looking less amused. “That time you drugged Bill without telling him?”

“I-I had to,” he was raising his fingers, like he was making a point, then put it away, remembering it truly didn’t matter now. “Yeah, that drug. It’s always given me visions of Derry’s past. It’s a plant that naturally has hallucinogenic properties, but the rest is all supernatural… probably due to Pennywise, and anything else out of this world that arrived here with it.”

“Uh...huh.”

“But since we killed it, I’ve noticed the properties changing. For the better, you might say.” Or the worse, one might also say. 

“How?” Ben asked.

“The pain of glass is broken.”

Bev and Ben exchanged glances together. The in-patient is cracking up.

He waved his hand. “It’s a metaphor. Before, you could see the past, but you couldn’t touch it. Bill, he only saw it once, and he saw it as like, dolls, marionettes, not real people at all. The figure get more real with time, but you can never interact. It was like there was always a window between you and the past. Look but don’t touch.”

“So now you can… touch?” Ben said.

“I can change the past.”

“Your vision of the past, you mean.”

“The past.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said with a kind of brittle flatness.

“I didn’t think so either,” he said, getting excited now. He hadn’t expected for this to turn into him trying to convince them, but that energy was there, the same one that had sent him writing desperately in his books. That remembered how good it felt too finally not be alone with this.

She stared at him, like something was coming together. “Your question about crying outside the Neibolt house!” she said. “Did that have something to do with this?”

He nodded.

Ben paled. “You don’t remember that happening?”

“It didn’t happen the first time.” He shrugged. “I cried the second time because…it was Stan.”

“Jesus,” Bev said, grabbing her purse off the coffee table and lighting a cigarette. We need to call Richie and Bill.”

They both agreed to come to Chicago on what was, all in all, very little information. Thank God all of his friends had disposable income to spare.

It was late enough for the three of them in Ben’s apartment to sleep, but Bev was pacing the floors. “I’d like to try,” she said softly.

“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” he said softly. “There’s not a lot left. I only brought enough with me to wean myself off the stuff. And Bill told you what it was like for him on it, trying it for the first time. It made him sick, and the visual was like a scene out of...what’s the guy who makes creepy-looking puppet movies?”

“Jim Hensen?” Bev offered.

“You don’t like the Muppets?” Ben whispered.

“The point is,” Mike said, “I don’t feel like any of us should use it until Bill and Richie get here.”

They fell into an uneasy sleep that lasted until about 9am, when Bill and Richie rolled in. 

“Turns out this asshole was on the same plane as me,” Richie said. “I tried to shake him but he followed me here.”

He looked around. “So, uh. What’s the big mystery? You guys were real cryptic over the phone. LA to Chicago red eye gives you a lot of time to catastrophize.”

They explained. Bill was staring at Mike hard throughout all of that. 

“Nine years,” he whispered, a look of something like wonder on his face.

Mike shrugged, feeling a sudden shy urge to run his hand over his hair. Back when they were eighteen he’d taken off in height past Bill, but he’d still felt like Bill towered over him in some way, that ineffable sense of _Leader_ that still clung to him, even as the shortest guy in the group. “Yeah. Guess I was feeling kind of bitter about how long it took."

Richie was looking between them. “Care to share with the class?”

"He asked if I'd go to college and I said in nine years. Which is how long it really took me. Because of the farm and my grandpa and everything."

Bill nudged Richie with his shoulder. “You were there. We were driving in your car to the Burger Pit after graduation.” Richie furrowed his brows at Mike like he was working hard at remembering. “That was talking about how none of us would remember you? Like forty-year-old you?”

Mike shrugged.

“It was the three of us and Stan,” Bill mused. “The only ones left by graduation.”

“Stan,” A long pause where he looked on the verge of crying. “Eddie. I mean, we’re in agreement about this, right? We’re bringing them back?”

A silence in the room where everyone looked at each other.

“We all want them back, Richie, just not if it puts killing _IT_ at risk.”

“How would having all of us alive put it at risk?”

Bill shrugged. “I’m not saying it would, but I mean, there’s always the possibility, you know, Chaos Theory, a butterfly flapping its wings could cause a hurricane....” 

“Bullshit. That’s just intellectual masturbation by nerds to make themselves feel better about the fact that they _don’t_ have access to a time machine.”

“Richie…” Bev whispered. 

“Come on. Please,” he whispered. “I can’t live with myself knowing I had the choice to save Eddie and take it. They both deserve having us go in after them any way we can.”

They looked between each other, doubtful, grief-stricken looks exchanged. 

“It’s going to need to be need be me,” Mike said softly. “I’m the only one who knows how to navigate the visions.” 

The others turned to look at him. 

“I think Richie’s right,” he continued. “We need to stick together. We only get a few more chances with this stuff, and then it’s gone. My mentor told me they’re already dying of rot this season. We won’t have time to get back to collect more this season, and she doesn’t think they’ll be back next season. If that’s true, then we’ve only got one last chance to make use of this. Let’s steal back one last thing from IT.”

The others were looking around, nodding. 

“One more thing, though,” he added. “If the times I’ve gone back before are anything to judge by, I’m the only who remembers how things were before the changes. If I can save Stan, and Eddie,” he braved a glance at Richie there, who started to flinch away, then shifted gears and held his gaze, his jaw tense and set. “None of you are going to remember losing them. Or anything else that might change.” He waved his hand, feeling foolish, and not sure what point he was driving at. “So, uh, take five minutes to say goodbye to this version of yourselves, I guess?”

To his surprise, they took him up on it. Maybe still remembering Bill’s talk of chaos theory, unlikely or just as hateful as it seemed, everyone looked at each other and hugged in turn. Ben and Bev kissed with a surprising desperation, like it was occurring to them that maybe they were not destined to end up together in every possible universe, but could only be desperately grateful when they did. Bill walked toward him and nodded stiffly, then pulled him into a hug. "You can tell me about it some time if you want, I promise to believe you.” 

"I'll miss this version of you," Mike said. "But I know ever version of you is great."

“Thank you,” was all Richie said, meeting his eyes again. He didn't have to say more.

He sat in one of Ben’s modern circular chairs, which was actually more comfortable than he ever would have expected to look at it. For old time’s sake, he smoked the pipe, even though he felt like he was setting off alerts in some expensive penthouse security system somewhere.

Most of the others had moved to another room, on the grounds that Mike had usually been alone when he had taken the drug, and had never had more than one other person around. Bill had stayed with him this time, off to the side, watching him closely.

“I’ve got some pictures of Stan from his accounting firm and his Facebook if you think that would help you, uh, visualize him.”

Mike had that too. He shook his head. “If it’s not connected to Derry, I don’t think it will do any good. I’ll need to focus on my memory of Stan, when he comes in contact with Derry again, when there’s still time to save him." He didn’t like that. DIdn’t like how little time that left him.

Bill nodded. “Sounds like you’ve thought it through.” He caught Mike’s hand and squeezed it. Held it a bit too long for comfort or deniability. Mike wondered briefly why it was so important for Bill to have this, when he’d lose this all in a moment either way, then realized, in a rush of foolishness, that it wasn’t for Bill. Decided that it was important after all.

Unspoken between them was the grim possibility that saving Stan, having Stan join them in Derry, could lead to them somehow failing to defeat _IT_ , through no fault of Stan’s. Perhaps something as simple as someone standing in the wrong place in the wrong time, the group moving a fraction of a second two slow. If that happened, not only would _IT_ still be alive when he returned to the present. Still killing. Still tormenting them. If _IT_ was still around, the time travel capacity of the root would have never been unlocked. There would be no do-overs if that happened.

All the more important to take another moment before their hands parted.

Mike lit the pipe.

* * *

“Mike!” The voice coming down the line expressed sudden recognition, like they were in the middle of a conversation already started. Of course, they were. 

He opened his eyes. His face was pressed against the screen of his phone. 

The voice continued over the line. Flustered. “God, sorry, yes. Hi. I don’t know why I didn’t… um.”

“Stan, I--” He began, then, stopped, suddenly realized his throat was dry, back in this dusty attic. He’d rehearsed what he was going to say, of course, but in the shock of hearing Stan, the man as he had been just moments before he’d killed himself, Mike was suddenly struck dumb, images from the police reports intruding violently in his head, wrapped around the lip of the tub like a lover. _Why’d you do it, Stan? How can I talk you out of_ _it?_ was all he could think.

“Mike from Derry?” Stan’s voice sounded frightened, now.

“That’s right,” he said softly, gently. Like a man who’d spent the last twenty-seven years at story-time in the children’s section instead of dodging it every chance he got to go read coroner’s reports in the microfiche instead. “Mike from Derry.”

It was dark out the window. He could see his own face in the window, the lights inside and the darkness outside turning the window into a mirror. He rarely closed the curtains. At least Derry’s indifference to what went on in its library had been good for something. He saw his own face, tired and scared, staring back at him, and behind him, the rest of the attic. Still piled with books, newspaper articles, artifacts…. 

He looked outside the window. In the dark across the lane, he could see the amusement rides, still and dark at this hour, black shapes blotting out the stars on the horizon.

He felt a wave of nausea rise at the horror he knew was going to come.

He looked down at the phone in his hand, the glowing numbers on the screen. 

It wasn’t until he put the phone up to his ear that he heard the ragged breathing on the other line, frightened and deep.

A small voice, tight and frightened, like a boy trying to push down every ounce of fear. “It’s back, isn’t it? That’s why you’re calling me.”

His voice caught in his throat.

“Stan….” 

“Is It back, Mike? Tell me, please.”

“Yeah, it is, Stan.” He had to start with honesty.

“Did you call the others?”

He looked down at the pad of legal paper in front of him. 

“Yeah. I did.”

There was a small, almost imperceptible hitch of breath over the phone.

“Please don’t make me go back there.”

The words came automatically. “I won’t make you. But I need you to listen to me. Remember what I told you in the back of Richie’s convertible? The day you guys graduated?”

Stan gasped. “I don't, I don't, it was such a long time ago."

"It was. I know. But you remember so much already. Do you remember that day?"

"We had burgers and it was so hot and and and. Um. You said something about wanting me to to be happy, I don't know--”

“Yeah! And for you to live your live. And I meant that. I still mean that. I know you’re scared. I know you feel like you can’t come back here."

"I can't."

"Like you couldn't go back into Neibolt Street? Remember that?”

A wet noise over the phone. “I made you cry.” 

Mike smiled in spite of himself. “No you didn’t.”

A wet noise, and the sound of Stan crossing a hardwood floor and his door closing. 

“Where are you right now?” Mike asked warily.

“”I’m in my office,” Stan said. "I don’t really want to freak out my wife having this conversation.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“If this is all some reverse psychology thing to get me to come to Derry, it’s not going to work.”

He nodded. “Okay. Well, just stay on the phone with me. Let’s keep talking.”

Stan was a polite guy. He never, ever just hung up on you. They talked through the night. They had never been the most talkative pair, he and Stan, but he talked to Stan about his birds and his accounting firm and his wife, and Stan seemed to know he was being bullshitted, being played into talking about pleasant things while evil shadows lurked in the background, but he was willing to go along with it. 

They touched on darker topics, when Stan was willing to go there. His father. The bullies of Derry. Once he mentioned the marks on his face.

Throughout the hours Mike feel the blurriness of the vision close in around him, trying to push him out, but he pushed himself further in. Hung onto his toehold in this spot in time. It was giving him a headache, trying to drag it out this long, but he didn’t care. He felt like he could feel Stan’s mood shifting with each hour.

At last, Stan went quiet for such a long time Mike thought he might have fallen asleep.

Then, Stan spoke. “Wow. Think it’s dawn. I don’t know if I’m ready to deal with this. But I want to see you again. I think I’ll book a flight. I think there’s a pretty good chance I’ll fly back out after the dinner is over, though, just so you know.”

Mike felt the sudden certainty that only distance kept him from crying on Stan’s shoulder again. He smiled even as he felt a distinct wetness on his face. “I always say everything looks better in the morning.”

He gave himself over to the throbbing headaches and the pounding lights behind his eyelids, and let the haze that had been trying to close back in for hours drag him back to the present.

* * *

He blinked and looked around, immediately surprised and a little alarmed to find himself back in Ben’s apartment, in one of Ben’s modern chairs at a dining table, sitting down to breakfast. But the room wasn’t quiet and the lights weren’t off. And the room was full. He blinked around him, puzzled at the faces around him. 

Six faces around him. Four he’d seen earlier today.

One he’d only seen in pictures before now, and how he ached, hearing that now familiar voice across the table.

One he’d watched die a few weeks earlier. And how was it possible that Eddie was alive? Right there, sitting next to Richie, and snapping at Stan. 

“Better watch it,” Richie was saying to Eddie. “That man saved your life.”

“Oh, it was like the butterfly effect,” Mike said. He got some strange looks for that, but he didn’t even particularly care. Only Bill looked at him for longer than a minute, a small, puzzled smile on his face. He decided he’d tell Bill about it sometime.


End file.
